From College to Workforce — 5 Highlights from Unilever Future Leaders’ Program
Reflections from a workforce newbie by Valerie Lim, Unilever Future Leader
I will be honest — my first day in Unilever was filled with uncertainty and anxiety. One year on and I’ve completed my first stint with Unilever’s Global Procurement team, and I dare say that I’ve smashed my first week’s insecurities. Beyond that, I was given opportunities that I had thought were beyond a fresh graduate like myself, and achieved more than I thought I could.
These are my top 5 highlights a year into the Unilever Future Leaders’ Program (UFLP).
- Organising Unilever’s First Hackathon
Our first project as UFLs was to organise the annual Future Leaders League (FLL). In 2019, we had our first ever FLL Hackathon, where the theme was to use digital solutions to drive our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.
Having been a participant of a hackathon before, it was interesting to be on the other side preparing the event. We liaised with managers from Lifebuoy, Procurement’s Post-Consumer Resins and Unilever Food Solutions teams to understand the on-going concerns around child nutrition, plastic collection and rural businesses in developing nations.
Together with Padang & Co, we hosted the top 20 teams at our Four Acres site, where the final challenge statements were revealed, and the teams had 48 hours to present their case to a panel from Procurement, Human Resources, and Health & Well-being.
Not only did this experience give me a better understanding of our sustainability goals, it was also the only chance for my batch mates and I to work together!
2. Leading a Global Digital Project
For my first stint in Procurement, my key project was to drive the Rigid Plastics team’s digital agenda to automate manual tasks and gain insights from pricing data. This included contract automation, creating dashboards for analytics, improving forecast accuracy etc.
Just 2 months into my role, there was a decision to move our entire project into another platform, and I was tasked to bring this project back to the drawing board and rebuild the system.
This involved speaking to multiple stakeholders including feedstock and regional managers to get clarity on the processes and pricing mechanisms, and with senior managers outside my team, to build a function to predict costs for innovation projects.
After getting clarity on the business needs, it was about translating them into Requirement Documents which the developers would use to build the system. This details the needed inputs and outputs, the underlying calculation logic, and data sources for each of the modules. From here, there were numerous iterations of testing to ensure that the logic was sound, and that the system interface fulfilled the business needs.
Whenever a module passed Quality Assurance tests, the next step was to conduct User Acceptance Tests across buyers from various markets and to gather feedback to sharpen the module before releasing it to Production.
On day 1, I would not have imagined that I would be leading a digital project, much less one on a global scale. Despite being based in Singapore, this gave me the chance to work with colleagues from various nationalities, and the project went live in Latin and North America, Africa, Europe and Asia.
3. Opportunities to Present to Senior Stakeholders
Despite being new in the organisation, I had the liberty to present the team’s digital agenda to many senior stakeholders in driving implementation.
Within my first 2 months in Unilever, I was tasked to facilitate a 3-day South East Asia & Australasia (SEAA) workshop, where we had country managers from each market coming together at our Four Acres facility to have them onboarded to the project.
I was also given the opportunity to speak about this digital initiative with Marc Engel, our Chief Supply Chain Officer, as part of the wider Digital Procurement agenda with senior managers during his visit to Singapore.
Recognised as a core part of Procurement’s digital architecture, I also represented the Rigid Plastics team at the start of 2020 to showcase the system as part of our competitive buying strategy. This sparked an interest in the project among other portfolios as well, and I created a teaser with a demonstration video that could be circulated throughout Procurement.
4. Visiting the Wall’s Ice Cream Factory
Other than driving the digital agenda, I was also responsible for Tubs and Lids portfolio under Rigid Plastics. I embarked on my first business trip to Indonesia to visit packaging suppliers situated in Cikarang. In 3 short days, I visited 5 suppliers, the foods Research & Development (R&D) Centre, Unilever’s Walls Ice Cream factory, and managed to squeeze in a visit to Unilever Indonesia’s office in Tangerang (which, by the way, looks like a mall).
Prior my visit, my understanding of the value chain was limited to excel spreadsheets and what I could find online. Yet in the factories, I could see the bags of resins, feel the heat from the machines, and hear the caps falling off the moulds. I could see first-hand how suppliers are handling their waste, which is often an additional cost to our price lists, and understand the factors impacting their conversion costs, such as the amount of manual labour used on the lines and the energy efficiency of their machines.
In October 2019, Unilever committed to halve the use of virgin plastic by 2025. As a portfolio, majority of our spend is for ice creams, hence I’ve also visited our R&D centre to explore non-plastic packaging options during my trip. Luckily for me, the Wall’s Ice Cream Factory is in the same compound as the R&D centre, and we visited the factory where our favourite ice creams from Cornetto, Walls and Magnum were being made. The best part was having the freshest piece of Magnum off the line!
5. Having a Purpose-led Career
Being in Unilever, there are plenty of opportunities to make an impact and give back to society. In developing the Tubs & Lids strategy, we explored ways to reduce plastic through light-weighting, and continuously pushed for replacing plastic with paper in savings workshops.
Outside of my day to day job, I had the chance to help launch the Unilever Refillery in our office staff shop, for colleagues to bring their own bottles to purchase Lifebuoy handwash, Sunlight dishwashing liquid and even Pond’s micellar water straight from the dispenser.
In more recent events, there was a partnership between the National Environment Agency and Unilever International to distribute 14,000 care packs to our hawkers in Singapore as part of the efforts to support them during Covid-19. I joined a group of volunteers to prepare the care packs, which included cleaning products in the Unilever Professional range and cleaning guides.
Final Thoughts
I was nervous at the amount of responsibility given to me at the start. Yet, when I look back at the past year, without these challenges, I would not have been able to create a new digital tool to change the ways of working in Procurement nor gotten the chance to represent Rigid Plastics in conversations with senior management. At the same time, there were so many opportunities for learning and personal development — from hackathons to factory visits and volunteering with Unilever.
I anticipate more challenges to come my way in the rest of my UFLP journey, but from what I’ve experienced, from each challenge comes growth.
